It's time Britain admits it was suckered into war

ROBIN COOK

Published
5:30 am CDT, Wednesday, June 4, 2003

CHUTZPAH is the word applied to people who radiate belief in themselves without any visible reason to justify it. In the chutzpah stakes, U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the scale.

Before the war, he told us that Saddam Hussein had "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active program to develop nuclear weapons." After the war, he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles or nuclear installations on the possibility that Saddam's regime "decided they would destroy them prior to a conflict." You have to admire his effrontery.

But not his logic. The least plausible explanation is that Saddam destroyed his means of defense on the eve of an invasion. The more plausible explanation is that he did not have any large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

We need to rescue the meaning of words from becoming a further casualty of the Iraqi war. A weapon of mass destruction in normal speech is a device capable of being delivered over a long distance and exterminating a strategic target such as a capital city. Saddam had neither a long-range missile system nor a warhead capable of mass destruction.

Laboratory stocks of biological toxins or chemical shells for use on the battlefield do not add up to weapons of mass destruction. But we have not yet found even any of these.

When the Cabinet of Prime Minister Tony Blair's government discussed the dossier on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, I argued that I found the document curiously "derivative." It set out what we knew about Saddam's chemical and biological arsenal at the time of the previous Persian Gulf War. It rehearsed our inability to discover what had happened to those weapons. It then leaped to the conclusion that Saddam must still possess all those weapons. There was no hard intelligence of a current weapons program that would represent a new and compelling threat to our interests.

Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life. Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years and anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Saddam's stocks were not of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical munitions were of such poor standard that they were produced on a "make-and-use" regimen under which they were usable for only a few weeks. Even if Saddam had destroyed none of his 1991 arsenal it would long ago have become useless.

It is inconceivable that no one in the Pentagon told Rumsfeld these home truths, or at the very least tried to tell him. So why did he build a case for war on a false claim of Saddam's capability?

Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of such ferociously reactionary opinion that he makes Rumsfeld appear reasonable. He has now disclosed: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on weapons of mass destruction because it was the one issue everyone could agree on."

Wolfowitz is famously a regime-change champion. He was one of the flock of Republican hawks who wanted a war to take over Iraq long before Sept. 11. Decoded, his remarks mean that the Pentagon went along with allegations of weapons of mass destruction as the price of getting U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Britain on board for war. But the Pentagon probably did not believe in the case then and certainly cannot prove it now.

Wolfowitz also let the cat out of the bag over the "huge prize" for the Pentagon from the invasion of Iraq. It has furnished an alternative to Saudi Arabia as a base for U.S. influence in the region.

As Rumsfeld might express it, we have been suckered. Britain was conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even our major ally really believed. The truth is that the United States chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat but because they knew it was weak and expected its military to collapse.

It is a truth that leaves the British government in an uncomfortable position. This week, Blair was pleading for everyone to show patience and to wait for weapons to be found. There is an historic problem with this plea. The war only took place because the coalition powers lost patience with chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix and refused his plea for a few more months to complete his disarmament tasks.

There is always a bigger problem in denying reality than in admitting the truth. The time has come for the British government to concede that we did not go to war because Saddam was a threat to our national interests. We went to war for reasons of U.S. foreign policy and Republican domestic politics.

One advantage of such clarity is that it would help prevent us from being suckered a second time. Which brings us to Rumsfeld's latest saber-rattling against Iran. It is consistent with the one-dimensional character of the Rumsfeld world view that he talks of Iran as if it were a single unified entity. In fact, Iran is deeply divided by a power struggle.

On the one side are President Mohammad Khatami and the majority of the Parliament who are reformers, reflecting the political reality that most Iranians consistently vote to join the modern world. On the other hand are the conservative forces of the old Islamic revolutionaries led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who still retains control over the security apparatus.

When Labor took office, I initiated a policy of constructive engagement with the reformist government, which has been skillfully continued by British Foreign Minister Jack Straw.

The blanket hostility to Iran of the Bush administration has undermined the reformers and provided a welcome shot in the arm to the ayatollahs.

British policy on Iran makes sense in securing the advance of the reformers, which is in the interests of ourselves and of the Iranian people. This time we must make clear to the White House that we are not going to subordinate Britain's interests to a U.S. policy of confrontation. Iran must not become the next Iraq.

Cook is the former foreign minister of Great Britain and was a member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet before resigning over the decision to go to war with Iraq.